Édouard Philippe, a former French prime minister and one-time ally of Emmanuel Macron, has said he favours early presidential elections given the gravity of the political crisis rocking the country.
The remarks by Philippe, a leading centre-right contender to succeed Macron, came as the outgoing prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, began a last-ditch effort to rally cross-party support for a cabinet to pull France out of its deepening political deadlock.
Philippe told RTL radio he was not calling for Macron’s immediate resignation but that the president should “announce that he is organising an early presidential election” once a budget for next year had been adopted.
“Time is of the essence,” he said. “We are not going to prolong what we have been experiencing for the past six months. Another 18 months is far too long and it is damaging France. The political game we are playing today is distressing.”
His comments were echoed by Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), who on Tuesday said he, too, supported first a dissolution of parliament, followed by parliamentary elections or early presidential elections.
Macron has asked Lecornu, who tendered his resignation on Monday morning only 27 days after he was appointed and 14 hours after his new cabinet was unveiled, to stay on for 48 hours to try to salvage the administration and chart a way out of the crisis.
The president has said he is ready to “assume his responsibilities” in case of failure, officials at the Elysée Palace have told French media, a remark widely interpreted as meaning he would call snap parliamentary elections.
There were also signs of growing dissent within Macron’s own ranks, with Gabriel Attal, another former prime minister, who leads the president’s centrist party, saying on Monday evening he no longer understood Macron’s decisions and it was “time to try something else”.
Lecornu, who resigned after opposition parties and allies alike denounced his cabinet for not representing enough of a break with previous line-ups, was meeting party leaders from 9am local time at his office in an attempt to breach the impasse.
France has been in a political crisis for more than a year since Macron called a snap election in 2024 that produced a hung parliament divided between three more or less equal blocs: the left, far right and Macron’s own centre-right alliance, with no majority.
Lecornu became the shortest-lived prime minister in modern French history when he resigned, the country’s France’s fifth premier since Macron’s re-election in 2022 and the third since the parliamentary dissolution of last year.
All parties are staking out their positions before presidential elections due in 2027 that are expected to be a historic crossroads in French politics, with the far-right RN under Marine Le Pen sensing its best chance yet of taking power.
It is also being played out against a deepening financial crisis. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is the EU’s third-highest after Greece and Italy, almost twice the ceiling permitted under EU rules – as is its projected budget deficit of nearly 6%.
